She Runs: Dara O’Bannon

Mother, wife, roller derby diva, and runner—this Texan seems to do it all.

If she were able to, Dara O’Bannon would help every single last stray animal find a home and she would pick up every single last piece of litter on the planet. As she says, “I have a bit of a bleeding heart, especially when it comes to people or animals. I really just want everyone to be taken care of.” So, from volunteering her spare time at a variety of charitable organizations, and hosting a monthly litter cleanup in her neighborhood, she is attempting to do so, one cause at a time.

She also runs. Growing up on a farm in North Central Texas, her parents were out working in the field all of the time. She soon realized that “it was much faster to get out to them on the tractors if she just ran there.” She didn’t realize that you could “do” anything with running until her first Field Day in elementary school where she found out that you could run, and win, races and not just run the length of the farm to talk to her parents.

Dara ran track and cross country in her small high school (“if you ran one, you had to run the other”) and though she didn’t run on a team in college, she still liked to get out and run socially from time to time. She ended up taking an extended break from running in her 20’s, working at a desk at her then IT job and eventually having a daughter, who is now in elementary school.

Four months after her daughter was born, Dara found her way to a local roller derby league. Not satisfied with the “coffee and cookies mom groups”, she found camaraderie, and quite a bit of shoving around, on the rink. For a couple of years, she managed to balance running and roller derby, skating 4 to 5 days a week and running the other days, when in 2007, her left tibia and fibula were shattered by a fellow roller derby competitor. After a surgery that required two plates, seventeen screws and one stabilizing rod, her surgeon told her that she’d probably always walk with a limp. She wasn’t deterred by this prognosis; after all, Dara is a person who describes herself as “a chihahua: I will chew up furniture if you don’t exercise me regularly.” Her derby teammates affectionately call her “bionic” or “Pyrobot” and her “derby name” is Pyro Maim Ya.

So she worked hard at her recovery, and a year after she broke her leg, she ran in her first 5K race and had an amazing time. She did a few more 5Ks after that and then decided that the next step (“of course”) was to start training for a half marathon. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on the circumstances, Dara is an “all or nothing” kind of person. When the late nights of post-derby heavy drinking with her team began to cut into her training, she knew she had to do something about it. Waking up six years ago the morning after a Halloween party, too hung over to do her scheduled long run, she realized that in order to move forward in all other parts of her life, she needed to cut drinking out completely. While she doesn’t begrudge anyone who can drink socially (“after all, my friends always know they have a designated driver!”), she also knows that alcohol limits her, and she is not the kind of person who likes to impose limits on herself.

On top of everything else she is, mother, wife, runner, Dara is also a certified personal trainer who specializes in corrective exercise and injury rehabilitation. After her derby injury, she realized her calling was to help others regain strength after injury and to also help those who had a sedentary lifestyle to get up and move. She has also recently taken on the role of teaching a “Run for God” class (www.runforgod.com) through her local church, which will culminate in her first ever 5K as a race director in September, information about which can be found on her blog (pyromaimya.wordpress.com).

And she’ll also be keeping it in the family this fall as she starts coaching her local Girls on the Run team (www.girlsontherun.com), a running group for girls in 3rd to 5th grade; her nine-year-old daughter will be gladly joining her mother as a member of the team.

Dara O’Bannon lives her life “trying to be the change I want around me”. Through volunteer work, running and living her life as brightly as the pink hair on her head, she surely is making a difference and “being the change”.